For the 7 individual adventures in the Hearts of Ravensdale book in the Wake of the Oldways campaign, about how long does it take to play through one adventure, for example the Shadow in the Barley? My group usually plays sessions that last around 3-4 hours. Roughly how many sessions would it take to get through it (assuming we don't cut any of the "optional" sections)?
My players are finishing Heap-Thing, and I’m trying to convince them to continue with Wake of the Oldwags. I’d like to give my party some “trash” that they found in the Heap-Thing challenge that will be a hook or interesting mysterious something that leads them to want to continue to discover what it is, or where it comes from, what it does, etc. Ideally this would be something I could directly tie into Wake of the Oldways in a fun and satisfying way, but I haven’t read the whole thing yet so not sure where the opportunities for a tie-in item would be. Any ideas or suggestions?
[Long post warning. TLDR: I need advice on how to Narrate after my players got very frustrated and may not want to continue playing LITM.]
So, I just ran my first two LITM sessions with my D&D group, playing Heap Thing. I wanted to see how the group liked the new system, and overall there was lots of positive feedback, especially about the quest system with milestones and abandons helping characters actually have more motivation and specific story threads for the DM to pull.
However, I ran into a bit of a roadblock at the end of the final session, as the characters faced The Heap-Thing, that I could tell was starting to frustrate the players and turned them off to the system. I'm not sure if it's just they were still thinking in D&D terms, or if I wasn't doing my job well enough as the Narrator, or maybe it's just a design flaw with the final challenge, or maybe a combination of those or maybe something totally different.
Basically, as the players were trying to deal with Heap-Thing, I could see they were getting very frustrated, feeling like nothing they did mattered. They tried a bunch of different tactics, including the usual ones you'd expect like fighting it, or trying to convince it to let everyone go, one of them was even clever and made soap to try and "clean" the thing. But because of the might level, very little was working. I was trying to drop hints about how to overwhelm it, but no one really picked up on that. One player finally asked to basically see if they could recall any weaknesses about the thing, but didn't roll very well, so I gave them some vague clues and vague info on how to defeat it, basically using the consequence to make the information not quite as specific as it could have been. (In hindsight maybe I should have just given them a more specific answer as the success and made the consequence something else.)
I could literally see the players starting to disengage as they felt like nothing they did worked, or nothing was helping, nothing mattered, even though behind the scenes they were increasing limits on Harm and Convince and even Overwhelm. I tried giving narrative hints that those things were happening, but I didn't want to just come right out and say "Good job you gave it convince-2!" so maybe my hints were too subtle. At a certain point I could really see they were done with the encounter when they started really going off the rails and having one Hero pee on the Heap Thing, because that helped put out the bonfire at the party. When that didn't work, they basically all just stoped playing, like "uh, we've tried everything I don't know what to do next."
Eventually I just paused the session and called it out. I told them I could see they were frustrated, and took responsibility as the Narrator for that, and just told them straight up what the creatures limits were, and what the easiest way to defeat it was. So we finished out the session. We had a convo afterwards about what they liked/didn't like in LITM, and they felt like this last encounter was very railroaded. Like there was one secret way to defeat this thing, and they had to just figure that out, and if their rolls didn't reveal the answer then they are just screwed, which I think was accurate for how it played out. Not sure if that was my failing as a Narrator or just an inherent issue with the design of Heap-Thing, his might/abilities/etc makes it very hard to overcome the challenge in almost any other way besides Overwhelm.
Anyway I hope that story makes sense and gives you an idea of what I'm trying to figure out. Do you have any tips or advice for how I as a Narrator could have helped this situation or done things differently? Any advice on how to help D&D players transition to LITM? Or maybe a way to pivot mid-encounter if I feel things heading in this direction, or a way to modify this challenge to not feel so frustrating to them? Thanks for any help!
I came across this paragraph on page 179 of CB1, in the "camping and sojourns" section.
Finally, some story tags represent things that remain in the story, but lose their importance and power to affect it. You may have looted a dagger from a dead body, but – unless you make it into a power tag – the dagger is not a permanent fixture in your Hero’s story. Your Hero may still possess the dagger, but actions with the dagger will no longer gain Power from it. You can prolong the importance of such things by recreating the same tag.
How would they "make it a power tag"? I assume that the dagger will stay in the Hero's backpack either way, it wouldn't become part of the Hero's theme cards unless they improve a theme and add the dagger to it. Is that what they mean by making it into a power tag? Or is there something else I'm missing?
I know my Heros would say "but I have this dagger, I should be able to use it/gain power from it" so just trying to understand this better.
I just Narrated my first session for our D&D group and it went pretty well, everyone picked up on the mechanics quickly and seemed to enjoy the narrative focus.
However I’m wondering if any of you have tips for how I as a narrator can keep track of all the various tags/statuses/limits for both my Heros and NPCs. It was hard for me to remember them all, and I couldn’t really come up with a good organizational way to write them all down so I know I missed a few that should have been used. What works for you?
I might be totally making this up, but in the excessive amounts of CoreBook reading I've done over the last few days I thought I remember reading something like Backpack tags are not allowed to be used during combat scenarios, only tags on their theme cards? Is that true or am I completely misremembering?
We are starting our first session tonight and my group has a woodsman character who has his axe in his backpack currently, but I want to make sure he is able to use it in combat (I know for sure that's what this player will try). Any clarification or explanation of those rules would be great!
I'll be running my D&D group through a few sessions of LitM to try it out and see how we like it. I'll be Narrator, but have never played it myself before so I'm a bit nervous. I'm wondering which adventure module you guys think is the best choice to introduce the system to both me and the players? The Demo game "A Shadow in the Barley" or the intro campaign from the Core Book "The Heap Thing of Skunk Glen." We have 5 players who have already made characters (all small-town, origin level characters) that should work for either campaign. Any advice would be great, thanks!
Hey all, my husband and I will be sailing on the Magic for an Alaskan cruise this week! We are super excited and have all our port excursions planned and paid for, but I'm wondering if people who have visited have any recommendations for other things to do/see in the ports? We will be visiting Skagway, Icy Strait Point, and Ketchikan. Any tips on places to eat, shop, walk/hike, etc as we spend some time in the towns?
Has anyone ever sailed in room 7636 (or 7136, they are mirrored) on the Magic or wonder? Just got assigned that in a verandah guarantee, looks like it’s usually a wheelchair accessible room. Seems like bigger floor space and verandah which is great, but it’s the whitewall verandah and near the back of the ship which I usually wouldn’t pick. Am I overthinking this?